The reasons why the NEXØ-II launch is postponed until 2018

Scopecreep

NEXØ-II was originally planned to be very similar to NEXØ-I. But as the year progressed more and more departments saw an opportunity to perform a full development iteration in order to bring their devices one step closer to being ready for SPICA.

This added to the development time and increased the test workload significantly.

Late delivery

This year we had an unusually large number of our members deliver their workpackages way later than scheduled.

This had severe impact on the schedule, since in several cases it held up other members and groups from starting parts of their work. This again made the dates for integrationtests slip to an alarming degree.

A lot of creativity was displayed in trying to redo the testplans to test as much as could be tested without the parts still in development.

At the time of writing we still have not seen a succesfull Harbour Acceptance Test. The one we did conduct could not be completed due to several systems not being ready for test or failing during the test.

This sad fact, combined with the expected Autum weather and a NoGo from an essential collaborator for the 23-24. of September, led us to decide to postpone the launch of the NEXØ-II rocket until 2018.

External factors

This year we had an unusually large workload handling external disturbances in July and August.

Had we only faced one of them, especially the first two, we would have been able to cope with it. But having all three on top of each other at the most busy time of the rocket season was too much for us, as it forced us to divert too many people away from testconducting and planning to instead deal with these external factors.

Firstly the danish authorities demanded a set of analysis based reports to be delivered before liftoff. This had not be a problem at all had they made the demand well in advance, but the demand came in early July when we were very busy. We had to take several of our most analytically minded people off the tasks of testplanning and systems integration to perform analysis and write the reports. Their capabilities and workeffort were sorely missed while they worked on the reports.

Secondly the danish press held a field-day over a bogus “double booking” of the launch area. It caused quite a stir in danish media and caused a bit of friction with the government agencies that we rely on for launching our rockets. Therefore we had to take people off the rocket work to instead conduct diplomacy with the government agencies and try to calm down the press. In the end it fizzled out, as the company that claimed to need the launcharea on the same days as us, turned out not to want to use it after all, when some days did became free for them to use. This was the same company that own and operate the submarine.

Thirdly the sad submarine criminal case. The entire world is apparently following the bizarre and sad submarine case. It does not involve us. Both the submarine and the person who did whatever it is that happened on that sad day onboard, left us in 2014. So to us, both he and the submarine is ancient history.

But a lot of the worlds press did not bother with details like that and happily reported that the submarine and the person was still a part of our organisation. We spent a lot of time monitoring the press from all over the world and demanding they change their stories to remove any reference to us. We fought to have foto and video material from our organisation removed from stories in the press all over the world.

A lot of presspeople came to our workshop, called us and wrote to us. Our workshop was practically under siege from the worlds press for several weeks. All we could tell them was that the submarine and the person left us is 2014, and to go talk to the company that is the present owner of the submarine.

The submarine-case itself caused a lot of grief amongst our members. Despite the submarine and the person having left our organisation years ago, a lot of us still remember both quite vividly, so reading up on the gory details in the press and coming to terms with all that being committed by someone we used to know and work with, caused a tremendous amount of grief amongst our members.

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